


Shadows for the foggy mind

by TerresDeBrume



Series: SEADLA Verse [7]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Dreams, Gen, Light Spoiler for SEADLA, Painkillers, Red-Head Loki, Red-Head Thor, Shapeshifting, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-28 20:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/678774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ship, he will learn later, is called a Drakkar, and the eagle’s land will later become America… but at present, none of that matters half as much as the feeling of wind rushing beneath his wings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadows for the foggy mind

**Author's Note:**

> So this one is a bit peculiar in that it deals with something Tony doesn't remember at all in the rest of SEADLA. Also it might be a bit spoilerish (because time loop) for the end(ish) of SEADLA.
> 
> Takes place between SEADLA Prologue and Chapter 1 :)

It’s kind of like dreaming, except a dream usually feels better.  
There’s the heavy bass of his heart in his ears and the low hum of an oxygen machine telling him to stay quiet ( _hhhu husssssssh, hhhu husssssssssh_ ) as if there were any other available option. His chest feels like lead and his limbs are heavier still, and everything around him look like it’s bathed in moonlight, the dim silver of a foggy winter night when it’s not really summer anymore but not quite autumn just yet.  
  
Hhhu husssssh the machine whispers, and it sounds like the hull of a sea he never knew, the beating of his heart a drum he never heard, the darkness of the room that of a moonless night in a time he never lived.  
  
He floats.  
The sea beneath him is inky blue, the waves not so high as to be fearsome, but there is a promise of rain in the air, perhaps a storm. Wind blows in his feathers and under his wings, and when he follows the sound of a drum near the water, he finds a long boat oared by two dozen men with meaty arms and thick necks, most blonde and fair of skin.  
  
At the front stand two men.  
He has never seen them before -he would recognize their fiery hair, their beards, their plaits. Still, they tug at his memory, the strong one with his booming laugh and the lithe one with his burning green eyes, and as he preens his feather clean, he cannot help but watch them from the corner of his eye.  
The strong one speaks with a voice like thunder, and although the words are foreign, the sense come easily to him:  
  
“Look, Brother! Father watches over us!”  
“This is no Muninn,” the lithe one answers, “Merely a Midgard raven.”  
“It may be you are right, but even so if there is a bird there must be land near.”  
“Aye,” the lithe one grunts as fog rises from the sea to their feet, coating the deck in fat coils of white smoke, “But Midgard’s Serpent is breathing tonight, and the men are nervous.”  
  
The two men look ahead but see nothing more than what he does: the silvery-white veil of a spirit’s tears, or maybe the cool but treacherous breath of some great beast. The visibility beyond their figurehead, a great serpent sculpted into the wood, is practically nonexistent, and he wonders how they plan on reaching any cost at all in this weather.  
Someone urges the lithe one to work his magic, another begs for him to call onto the All-Father himself, while some ask for a God named Thunderer -that one makes the strong red-headed man chuckle.  
  
The lithe man with emerald in his eyes and fire in his hair climb on the figurehead, right next to him, and throws him a look that bears deep secrets and more years than any living man could recall. They are fools, the green gaze seems to say, foolish men calling the wrong names.  
But at last, he cups his hands around his mouth and bellows:  
  
“JORMUNGANDR, GRANT US PASS!”  
  
The sound is so violent he nearly sheds all his feathers right then and there, wings bristling with the potency of a voice he would have otherwise overlooked.  
  
“Must be a bloody deaf fellow for you to shout that loud,” someone says.  
  
Next to him on the figurehead, a tall bird has elected to land on the lithe man’s thigh. Its body is a deep brown but his head is covered in gleaming white feathers, and its yellow beak and talons shine like small suns in the night.  
  
“Useless though,” the bird continues, “he’s not like to grant you any passage to my lands.”  
“Yours?” The fiery man says, eyebrow arching. “Who is  _he_  then?”  
  
The lithe man points to him then, and the white and brown bird considers him carefully.  
  
“A skinwalker,” he says at last. “A man in a raven’s skin. One of mine, through and through, I can tell. He was born in these lands, and in these lands he shall make his way to the next world.”  
“How do you know that?” He asks, curious. He is a raven, not a man; of that he is sure.  
“I know many a thing,” the other bird says simply. “I know you have never slipped your skin before and I know there is not enough of the gift left in you to do it again. I know you never knew you were capable of that, and that something -or someone- stronger than yourself sent you to this time and place.” The bird tilts its head and for a brief moment it looks as if his beak wore a smile. “I know, too, that it is time for you to go back to your own body and your own time, Tony Stark.”  
  
Tony opens his beak to protest, but already things are blurring around him and the world spins, turning to smoke, to haze, to dust.  
  
His eyelids feel heavy as stone when he tries to look at the ceiling, but all he sees is the piercing green gaze of a man with a red beard and runes tattooed on his face, as lithe and tall as he was on the boat.  
  
“I was a crow,” he says, throat parched and mind confused by the sudden change in scale and setting. Everything looks a lot smaller now.  
“I know,” the man says, a small smile playing at the edge of his lips as the lines of runes tattooed on his face move like snakes -a semi-circle on his brow, two lines from either eye, four below his chin. “I was the one who sent you.”  
“Why?” Tony asks, trying to puzzle out the solution to his dilemma, but his wits elude him as quick as goblin gold slips from the fingers of a fool -somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders where that image  comes from.  
  
The man’s eyes shine in the moonlight, a deadly shade of poison green ready to strike. Still, his voice is soft when he says:  
  
“I just wanted to make sure I’d know to come to your rescue.”  
“Who are you?” Tony asks, speech slurred by the cloud of morphine coursing through his veins -it reminds him, dimly, of another hospital, another time, and the light of a reactor in his chest… The blue glare is absent now, but somehow Tony doesn’t find it strange. “Why did you want to make sure I’d be saved?”  
“I’m just a dream,” the man says.  
  
He bends to kiss Tony’s lips, and the scrape of his beard, the oh-so-faint scars at the edge of his lips, the warmth of his skin feel oddly familiar. He straightens up, something soft and a little scared dancing in his eyes in the moment before he says:  
  
“And one day, I hope to be more than that.”  
  
He puts a hand on Tony’s eyes, sending him straight to sleep.  
When he wakes again, it’s light outside, and he remembers nothing past the cold kiss of a knife on his wrists.  
  
“I was beginning to fear you would never wake.”


End file.
